Unknown Detroit revealed on bus tours (with video)

Detroit -- The bustling Eastern Market is a fitting backdrop for the start of a bus tour of Detroit, a city that refuses to die.

Dave Waddell, Windsor Star

Updated: April 16, 2013

The Detroit Bus Company's Frontier Anarchy tour included stops at the Abick's bar which was established in 1907 and one of the few bars that survived prohibition. Manya Abick, 89, poses behind the bar March 30, 2013, where she has worked her whole adult life. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

Detroit — The bustling Eastern Market is a fitting backdrop for the start of a bus tour of Detroit, a city that refuses to die.

An average of 40,000 shoppers check out the market’s 250 vendors each Saturday, just as Detroiters have done at this site since 1891. If nothing else, spying a box of a dozen Leamington tomatoes on offer for $10 US in late March is a tour highlight before the bus even pulls away from the curb.

Who would’ve known this Detroit still existed downtown?

It’s a question that prompted Detroit Bus Company founder Andy Didorosi to begin offering tours of a city that once represented America’s industrial might and now is the poster child for its malaise.

“This is an easy way for people to come down to the city for three or four hours, get a beer, see some things and hear some cool history,” said the 26-year Didorosi, who was named by Crain’s Detroit Business magazine as one of Detroit’s top 20 entrepreneurs in their 20s in 2011.

“We purposely use the Eastern Market as our downtown pickup so that everyone picked up in Royal Oak and Ferndale has to see the market before they start the tour.

“Every single tour you hear, ‘Holy (crap), there’s some neat stuff down here.’”

Didorosi added the bus company to his business portfolio a year ago as a bar service, but this year he’s started offering a variety of themed tours of his hometown.

Standing in downtown’s restored Capital Park, surrounded by buildings featuring the work of Detroit’s favourite architect Albert Kahn and noted design/jewelry firm Tiffany and Co., it becomes obvious this isn’t going be to some dry tour filled with historical recitations.

Tour guide Amy Elliott Bragg, who has written several books on the city’s history, fills her tales with rogues, the righteous and the rib-tickling.

Elliott Bragg delights in the embarrassment of city leaders misplacing the body of Michigan’s first governor Stevens T. Mason, who had been buried in Capital Park.

“Somehow he was six feet from where he was supposed to be,” Elliot Bragg said. “Digging up people and losing bodies seemed to happen a lot in Detroit as the city grew.”

The Detroit Bus Company’s Frontier Anarchy tour included stops on March 30, 2013, at the Abick’s bar which was established in 1907 and one of the few bars that survived prohibition. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

The trip also provides a tour through Detroit’s early ethnic history.

It touches on the migrations of the French, Irish, Germans and now the Hispanic community, which has spread far beyond the cluster of restaurants in the shadow of the Ambassador Bridge.

Nothing illustrates that more than magnificent Ste. Anne’s de Detroit Church.

Founded in 1701 by the French, making it the second-oldest continuously operating Roman Catholic parish in the U.S., the twin-spired Gothic revival structure dating from 1887 now serves a mainly Spanish-speaking congregation.

Venturing farther, the stretches of Michigan Avenue and Vernor Highway running through the heart of Mexican Town are bursting with activity on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

For several blocks it feels more like Mexico City than the Motor City.

“The main streets of Mexican Town, like Vernor, are now among the most vibrant in the city,” Elliott Bragg explains to those gawking out the bus windows.

As the tour unfolds, Elliott Bragg paints a picture of the industrial giants whose names grace the streets the bus rolls along. Their lives and incredible wealth are remarkable examples of a city which produced many of the creative and frequently eccentric architects of the American manufacturing revolution.

The Detroit Bus Company’s Frontier Anarchy tour included stops on March 30, 2013, at the Woodmere cemetary which is the resting place of James Vernor and many other notable Detroiters. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

Before there was Henry Ford there was the mega-wealth of Daniel Scotten and his Hiawatha Tobacco empire.

Uncle Dan, as he was known, was a philanthropist who loved to take his ornate carriage pulled by magnificent white stallions downtown for a drink.

Pharmacist James Vernor also got into the drinks business, inventing the ginger ale Vernor’s, which is the oldest soda pop in America.

Many of the industrialists’ beautifully designed factories and homes remain a testament to Detroit’s gilded age.

“Old history doesn’t have to be dry, dusty and boring,” Bragg Elliott said. “I try to bring life to the people I talk about. They’re the real history of Detroit.”

The Detroit Bus Company’s Frontier Anarchy tour included stops on March 30, 2013, at the Woodmere cemetary which is the resting place of many notable Detroiters. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

While this tour focused on history that pre-dates the arrival of the automobile age in 1910, the present also forces its way into the conversation.

The hulking ruins of once mighty factories and the abandoned homes of the families who earned their paychecks in these ghosts of Detroit is a car wreck that’s hard to avert your eyes from.

There’s still money to be made in these neighbourhoods, but Didorosi passes on the easy pickings.

“You don’t want to exploit Detroit,” said Didorosi, who now has five buses in his stable.

“A lot of people want to go on ruin tours, abandoned stuff and want to see desolation. That’s a cheap sell.

The Detroit Bus Company’s Frontier Anarchy tour included stops on March 30, 2013, at the Abick’s bar which was established in 1907 and one of the few bars that survived prohibition. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

“We completely refuse to do anything like that because there’s so much more of a story here. We don’t ignore it, we try to explain it.”

Venturing through blue-collar neighborhoods, down to an industrial waterfront with no pretense of prettiness and finally past Fort Wayne is a journey of Dickensian dimensions.

One can see it has been the best of times and the worst of times for Detroit, but most importantly it’s a must see to fully understand the journey our neighbours to the north are on.

“What surprises people about the city is the life,” Didorosi said. “They expect the city to be dead because that’s what they hear.”

With an early spring sun luring throngs of people into the city’s public places, one wonders if reports of Detroit’s demise have been exaggerated.

The Detroit Bus Company’s Frontier Anarchy tour included stops on March 30, 2013, at the Woodmere cemetary which is the resting place of many notable Detroiters. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

Clark Park in Mexican Town is alive with two baseball games, a soccer game, tennis and a tai chi class. A couple of streets over, in a park just off Michigan Avenue, there’s a massive Easter party complete with barbecues and bands.

At this point, the 15 tour bus riders are ready for a party stop of their own.

Travelling through three centuries of Detroit’s history is a parching path to follow.

The first six winners of the on-bus beer bingo, having collected the historical clues required, are duly rewarded with a beer in 106-year-old Abick’s bar.

In the same family for five generations, this little gem of a neighbourhood pub at 3500 Gilbert St. features the original tin ceilings, stained glass and wood bar.

There’s another fixture sitting at the end of the bar in owner Mayna Abick.

Turning 90 this fall, Abick has spent nearly every day of her life in this place, where virtually everyone knows her name.

“It’s the people that make a good bar,” Abick said of the tavern, which features a cigar lounge where the barber shop next door used to be.

“We get a lot of policemen, firemen and hipsters (Wayne State students).”

The Detroit Bus Company’s founder Andy Didorosi poses on March 30, 2013, next to one of his buses in Detroit. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)

When asked how the pub survived Prohibition, Abick offers a politician’s smile before delivering a well-practised line.

“I don’t remember seeing alcohol served here then,” said Abick, who still helps make the perogies and other Ukrainian delicacies served in the bar.

“We served soda pop while the men waited to get their hair cut next door.”

The lure of the friendly oasis is hard to leave, but an audience with Detroit royalty beckons.

Many of Detroit’s icons are buried in Woodmere Cemetery, a tranquil bit of nature that’s the final resting place to 190,000.

Among the famous dead there are James Vernor, Daniel Scotten, David Buick, creator of the Buick car company, Henry Leland (founder of Cadillac), James Scripps (Detroit News founder) and Hamilton Carhartt (founder of Carhartt workwear).

As the bus heads back to the Eastern Market, the relaxed banter among those who had been strangers three hours ago is the measure of success Didorosi is seeking.

“We’ve already had 291 people sign up for their second or third tour,” Didorosi said.

“There’s kind of a beauty of the confined space (on the bus) and sharing the experience. It’s getting out in the city and talking to people.”

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